Bits: The Dirty Dungeon

(The 'Bits' category is where I put interesting bits & pieces of game rules, ideas, etc. The idea is that you can, without too much effort, pick up these bits and use them in your game.)

Today's bit is John Wick's take on dungeon crawling, a well-known gaming past-time. You can find a video with John describing it at this address: http://wickedthought.livejournal.com/760544.html. I've also embedded the video below.



In a nutshell, John is advocating a pretty radical change in how the gaming group approaches your typical dungeon crawl. Normally the GM preps a dungeon crawl by designing the dungeon floor plan, adding monsters, mixing in treasure, and finally spicing it up with some nasty traps.

Forget all that.

John's video describes a system in which you, the DM, let the players design the dungeon for you. They come up with the floor plan. They decide what monsters inhabit the dungeon. They put together all those nasty traps. It is assumed that all of this is information their characters have discovered by investigating rumors about the dungeon. A player could say, "Hey, my character found all of this info from that one-armed guy in the bar who actually went in that dungeon." Another player could say, "Well my character did some research in the local library/temple and found out this info."

So where does the DM come in? Well for every 10-15 minutes that the players spend designing the dungeon, the DM gets to throw in a complication. A complication is something like, "Hey, that wall isn't supposed to be there!" So, when the dungeon crawl starts rolling, the DM can have some tricks up his/her sleeve.

It's a very interesting idea, and one that I would love to try. You really would need a group that can think-ouside-the-box. I can easily see this system going awry if players aren't used to having much narriative control of the game. With a little gentle DM prodding, I'm sure this system could bring new life into an old genre convention.